


Ships in the Night

by astralis



Category: Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel
Genre: Gen, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 05:54:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13140465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astralis/pseuds/astralis
Summary: A day is all it takes to save Miranda's life. It takes more than a day for her to figure out what to do next.





	Ships in the Night

**Author's Note:**

  * For [APgeeksout](https://archiveofourown.org/users/APgeeksout/gifts).



> The first time I read the book I held out desperate hope that Miranda would survive, possibly past the moment when it became blatantly obvious that she wouldn't. I had to give her a second chance.

A double booked helicopter, a change of plans, a side of coincidence: she didn’t know it at the time but that was all it took to save Miranda Carroll’s life. It meant she never crossed paths with a carrier of the Georgia Flu, never developed a sore throat or a full body ache or a fever and didn't take her last breath on a beach far from home. So much of what happened in the few days it took for the world she knew to fade into history came down to luck and for once, Miranda was on the right side of it.

She boarded the _Neptune Star_ a day later than she should have done. The company helicopter - it was ridiculous that they even had one here, but they did - had been pressed into service delivering a urgent replacement part to one of the other vessels. Miranda had said she was happy to delay things for a day, and then Clark told her Arthur was dead and everything began to seem inconsequential anyway. She was thinking about Arthur as they glided towards the _Star_ , ignoring the chatter of pilot and guide in her headphones, and remembering him with every step she took once they landed. If there was an instruction book on how to cope with the sudden death of your ex-husband, Miranda had never read it but wished she had.

Knowledge of the much bigger tragedy came to her slowly. It was easier to grasp the fact that Arthur was gone, dead, would never finish playing King Lear or drink another cup of coffee than it was to even consider the reality that millions of people were dying in a wave of death sweeping the world. The crew around her spoke in hushed voices. News alerts kept lighting up her phone when she stepped into the only part of the ship where she got signal. On another vessel, someone was setting off flares and she dreaded to think why.

If they were looking help they probably weren’t going to get it.

Miranda thought of Leon, first, as the understanding of what was happening took shape. Her boss and the closest person she had to a friend. Was Leon alive? Would he be alive in a day, two days? They were hearing New York had been, inevitably, hit hard. She thought of Clark Thompson and wondered if he was still alive and on his way to Arthur's funeral; if there would even be a funeral now for Arthur, or for anyone. She thought of Arthur's son, Tyler, of whom she had spent eight years trying _not_ to think, and thought that at least Arthur would never know his son was probably going to die so very young. Tyler, the last part of Arthur, and likely dead in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or somewhere unexpected, the way Miranda might be about to die somewhere completely unexpected.

Her legs becoming uncooperative she sat down on the deck. Anchored as she was the _Star_ moved only slightly, with a gentle rocking motion that might under any other circumstance have been soothing but in this one was distressing, almost nightmarish. Miranda wanted the horizon to stay still so she could fix her gaze on it.

It did not.

The question, then, was what to do next. According to radio reports, according to the patchy internet she could get on her phone, the flu had arrived in Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur had almost completely shut itself down in a matter of hours, the hospitals were inaccessible, the government barely functioning, and the sickness had spread. People coming from London or Frankfurt or Shanghai who got off planes at Kuala Lumpur and boarded other, smaller aircraft to go home to their friends and families and their daily lives had carried the virus with them, had taken it home as a final and deadly souvenir.

News coming out of Singapore was the same. The same for Hong Kong, for mainland China, Japan, Thailand, even Australia, New Zealand. Countless people dead and dying, hospitals overwhelmed and civilization slipping away. 

Even if she could get to Kuala Lumpur all the flights were grounded. At first Miranda thought about going there anyway and waiting until they inevitably began again - if she could just get anywhere in the American continent she'd be fine, she could make her way home from there - of course, that raised the question of where _home_ even was these days - but then common sense prevailed. If she made it to Kuala Lumpur, and that was a very big 'if', she would likely die of the flu before the first flight departed.

The only safe place in reach was right where she was standing and the only thing to do was to stay where she was for the duration, however long that might be.

Miranda found, however, that her companions didn't agree. She was fortunate, in an odd way, in that she had no family out there or anywhere else. Everyone else did and they were desperate to get home, to be with their loved ones whether in the hope of saving them or with the intention of dying with them she wasn’t sure.

"You'll die out there," Miranda said. The words sounded like something out of a movie and they couldn't possibly be real. She couldn't possibly mean what she was saying. "It's suicide."

"I have a wife and children," said her pilot. "They might still be alive. If I can get home I'll bring them back."

"And you might bring the virus onto this ship."

He shook his head and Miranda knew he'd be willing to risk that - to risk her safety and that of anyone else who chose to remain - for the slight chance of saving his family. And she couldn't blame him in the least.

When the helicopter took off it took with it all of the _Star’s_ ’s skeleton crew. Every single one of them had people on shore and Miranda's line of reasoning failed to work on any of them. Their faces covered in paper masks, as though that could possibly do anything to halt the spread of a virus as deadly as this one apparently was, one by one they’d boarded the helicopter without looking at her.

"Last chance," said the pilot.

It wasn't like there were any empty seats anyway. In fact, the machine looked rather precariously full of people. Miranda shook her head.

"Get out of the way of the downdraft then or you'll be blown overboard."

Those were the last words Miranda would hear from another human for days. Unable to speak she nodded and walked the length of the ship, from the stern where the helicopter sat, across the long deck that had never held the containers it should have, around the bridge and onto the foredeck.

The blades began to whir, the noise racing through the air towards her.

Miranda sat down and closed her eyes and waited, and didn't open them again until the sound of the chopper had faded away.

*

When she could walk again Miranda pushed herself up to her feet and entered the ship's superstructure. Leon had gone over the plans with her long ago in that Toronto office, as gleeful as a child with a new toy, and she'd had a quick guided tour before everything had fallen apart. Now, methodical, needing to occupy her hands and her mind, she worked her way through the bridge and then down below decks. She found the galley and began opening cupboards, struggling at first with the latches that kept everything locked up tight in rough seas. It looked like the crew had been surviving mainly on cans of baked beans, but there was fruit there too, canned tomatoes, canned corn, and what felt like a ridiculous amount of flour. Crackers, oats, bread, cheese, tuna. She might not starve for a while, but she wasn't likely to get much pleasure from her meals either.

The crew's dining room was still littered with personal belongings. Jackets, hats, a cell phone someone had undoubtedly left behind unintentionally. Magazines that might be described - kindly - as soft porn, which she gathered up to throw out, and old copies of the Straits Times. Those she kept, for reading material.

Miranda's explorations wound up in the captain's cabin. It had never been inhabited, even at anchor, and was coated in dust. There were no sheets on the bed but she found a pile of blankets and several pillows in a cupboard, all sterile blue and musty.

With her arms full of pillows she sank down onto the bed. Arthur was dead and the world had fallen apart and she was the only person she'd ever met that she could guarantee was still alive. She was in charge of a ship she didn't know how to operate, and she had no clue what to do next.

*

Miranda barely slept that night and she also failed to eat for two days. She spent her time trying to call Neptune’s local offices in South East Asia and Australia, trying to reach Leon on every number she had, trying to call every consulate and embassy she thought might help her and always, always coming up with nothing.

*

On day three she woke early, suddenly hungry. She made herself a bowl of oats with only white sugar for flavour, cut up a browning banana into slices to go on top, and took it up on deck to eat in a futile attempt to pretend she was on holiday somewhere tropical. That didn’t work, possibly due to the dreadfulness of her breakfast, but she’d apparently underestimated how much she actually needed food to function. It was like feeling blood returning to her limbs and her senses coming back to life.

Once she’d eaten she started thinking, and she spent the day working her way through the ship, bow to stern, more carefully now than she had the first time. She raided, with only a hint of guilt, the personal quarters of the three men who had been calling this place home, gathering up chocolate bars and clothing, cash, soap and toothpaste and even, wonderfully, a brand new toothbrush still in its packaging. She paced the bridge, opening every compartment she could find, making a pile of manuals and instructions that used technical terms she barely understood. At least it was unlikely she'd ever need to know the ship's damage control procedures given that they called for multiple trained personnel for the operation to succeed: if the ship was on fire, Miranda thought, she might be better off taking her chances with the sharks. (She also, just to be sure, completed an examination of the lifeboats, and figured she could probably lower one if she ever had to.) She collected all the flashlights and flares and first aid kits she could get her hands on and stashed them on the bridge for easy access in the event of she didn’t know what, and she gathered up all the paper that wasn’t busy being something important and all the pens and pencils she could find.

Miranda was thinking, all the time that she worked, not of her parents or her aunt or even, really, of Arthur, but of Leon. "Miranda _copes_."

Well, Leon, she thought; look at me now, _coping_ with this ship of yours.

I hope you're proud.

Operating on an empty stomach again and worn out from a day as some kind of modern-day hunter-gatherer, Miranda sat down at the table on the bridge and spread out a chart of the English Channel, face down. Why the _Star_ , too big to navigate the Channel, even had one on board was beyond her, but there it was and at least it would come in handy for something. The paper wasn't exactly proper drawing quality and the pencils were probably the cheapest to be had in a Kuala Lumpur grocery store when the ship was being outfitted but it was enough. Miranda could make do. She could _cope._

In her mind she divided the chart into squares and panels and began, in the top left hand corner, to sketch the outline of Doctor Eleven alone at his desk with his head in his hands.

_If I could give the Undersea everything they wanted, what would it matter?_

“This is _King Solomon_ to all ships. _Laura Marshall_ , you still out there?”

Miranda startled as the radio came to life, smudging the image with a jerk of her hand.

Actual humans. Actual voices. Actual people, still alive. She realized she wasn’t breathing, and started again.

“This is _Laura Marshall_ , yeah, we’re still here. Where did you think we’d go?”

“Still no flu?”

“Not here. You?”

“Nothing.”

“I figure if any of us had it - ”

“We’d be dead by now?”

“Basically, yeah. You hear from the _Captain James_ at all?”

“No. Nothing. Can’t hear anything, can’t see anything.”

“I gotta say I think they’re gone.”

On shaking legs, and without conscious thought or planning, Miranda had stood up and made her way to the radio. She stood there now with her hand an inch off the transmit button. Her first impulse was to push it, to join this conversation, to say _this is the Neptune Star and I’m here too._ The fear-driven part of her brain objected to getting in touch, to publicizing her loneliness and vulnerability.

But they didn’t have to know there was no one else on board.

Miranda took a deep breath and pushed the button. “Hello?”

*

Like a prisoner - which, in a lot of ways she actually was - Miranda had taken up recording the days in the captain's empty log book.

Day 1: inspected ship.

Day 2: nothing.

Day 3: nothing

Day 4: assessed and reorganized supplies. 

Made contact with two other ships. There are other survivors out there.

*

The conversations continued for the next two nights. Miranda, using every bit of knowledge dredged up from her years at Neptune, did her level best to act like she was the officer in charge of the _Star_ and had a crew of five on board. She was pretty sure nobody believed her about the first but she hoped like hell that they believed her about the second. With no clue who else might be listening in, broadcasting the fact that she was a woman alone on a ship she knew little about seemed like a terrible idea.

*

Day 8: The others want to join forces. Logical me thinks it’s the only way to go but that it might also be riskier than I realise.

Day 9: I can’t stay on this ship alone until I die of starvation or old age. I don’t think there’s any other decision I can make.

I only hope I’m doing the right thing.

*

They had to meet up on the _Star_ because Miranda had no idea how to get any of the boats lowered, much less get into one herself or navigate to another vessel. _Solomon_ arrived first, not three people, but two. One wore a knife at his waist; Miranda greeted them with her crowbar at her side. "Welcome aboard."

Ten minutes later there were seven people standing on _Star_ 's deck: seven people who had survived the end of the world. No one questioned the inescapable truth that Miranda was one person instead of five, because as it turned out she wasn’t the only person who’d been lying about the number of souls on board. If they’d all been telling the truth there would have been sixteen people here.

"Okay," she said, looking out at them all and feeling like she was in charge of this gathering, what with being the closest thing _Star_ had to a captain. "Now what do we do?"

*

The topic of conversation, long into the night, was other survivors. "The cities are gone." That was Tony, who had been sailing these waters since he was a child, he said, and had taken up a position with Maersk to make some easy money. "That's the truth of the matter. But the smaller towns on the coast, maybe they survived. Maybe no one carrying the flu made it there before they died."

"Islands, too," said Daisy, who hailed from Singapore and had been crewing cargo ships in south east Asia and the Pacific since she was 18. "The Pacific Islands are probably okay. Before all the radios went down I heard that Samoa didn't have the flu and they’d closed the airport. They turned away a flight from New Zealand. Sent it right back.”

“Remote settlements,” Miranda added, not wanting to picture that plane heading back to a flu-filled country. Daisy's reference to islands had sent her mind a long way away and she was trying to play it cool. When she thought about it it was quite possible that Delano was unaffected; Vancouver Island probably had it but Delano and Salt Spring and the others, with their smaller populations, might have escaped. "I'm from Canada. All our northern settlements and communities are probably okay up in the Arctic. Same with Iceland, Greenland, all the rest. And small rural towns as well. Head across the prairies and I bet you’ll find people.” She had felt for days that she might be the only living person in the whole world but logic and the six people looking at her told her that she wasn’t. Now all she could think about was how she’d been so stupid.

"So the question, then, is whether we sit out here and do nothing or whether we try to make it to one of these communities." Tony, again: in other circumstances Miranda might have resented the ease with which he stated things as fact. In this case he was way ahead of her as far as possibilities went.

"Between all of us," Miranda asked, trying to assert or reassert herself, "could we sail one of these ships?"

The answer, it seemed, was that they could, and that they had only to decide where they were going. There were a few proponents of heading for Australia and hoping to find survivors in Cairns or Darwin, Daisy wanted to sail from island to island in the South China Sea, Miranda wanted nothing more than to head out across the Pacific and aim for Vancouver. It looked like being a stand-off, desperate strangers trying to persuade each other into an agreement, each with their ulterior motive which was why, in the end, the Australia plan lost. No one had family there.

“So these islands, then,” Daisy said, taking the reins of the scattered conversation, gathering them all in again. Seven people leaned over the map to see what she was pointing at, their heads casting shadows in the glow of the single lantern that obscured the islands anyway. “We’ll have to be careful through here but with one of the smaller vessels we should be fine. And then…” She drew a line to the north of the Philippines, south of Taiwan and then out to the Pacific Ocean. “Samoa and French Polynesia are too far south. Out of our way. If we’re going to stop - maybe Wake, Midway, Hawaii even - and then aim for San Francisco, San Diego.”

“Vancouver,” Miranda said, forgetting that she’d once figured anywhere on the continent would do her just fine. 

Daisy put then pencil down and looked at Miranda as though she’d just proposed a trip to the moon. “You ever sailed into Vancouver?”

Miranda had to admit that she hadn’t. She was pretty sure that too many ferry rides between Delano and the lower mainland didn’t count as actual sailing. 

“It’s a bloody nightmare getting through the Gulf Islands at the best of times. And this sure isn’t the best of times.”

“Victoria, then.”

“San Francisco.”

“Seattle.” It was still closer than any port in California.

Everyone else at the table was looking back and forth as though they were participants in a tennis match. For a moment Miranda felt like she was Doctor Eleven, trying and failing to negotiate with the inhabitants of the Undersea, trying to persuade them into what she knew to be the right thing to do. It would almost certainly be easy enough to find some settlement on some island where they could make a home.

Doctor Eleven didn’t have a Tony to interfere in the conversation but Miranda did. Given that she was planning to spend a few weeks at least at sea with these people, having a Tony might become quite unfortunate. “How about we decide some other things first. Like which ship we’re taking. And maybe a chain of command.”

Miranda’s eyes met Daisy’s across the table. “Let’s vote on that,” Daisy said.

“I nominate Daisy,” Miranda said, as fast as she could possibly manage.

*

Day 20: My last day on the _Luck_. We set sail today on the _King Solomon_ under Captain Daisy Tan, final destination somewhere in North America, assuming we get that far. We’ve raided every ship in the fleet for food, fuel, medical supplies and equipment and taken everything that we could possibly use. At least if we don’t reach the mainland we could probably build our own settlement on an island somewhere.

I plan to take a copy of this log with me and leave the original here, just in case anyone ever finds it, or if we get wrecked somewhere. It feels like there should be something.

This is Miranda Carroll, (formerly of) Neptune Logistics, signing off. For now.


End file.
